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Friday, June 02, 2017

Di Leo: Truth, Lies, and The Paris Accord

By John F. Di Leo -

In 2015, one of the endless subsets of the United Nations – specifically, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC – gathered to write a retreat from modernity based on the junk science known as “man-made global warming,” or, more recently, since the discovery of the undeniably fabricated “hockey stick” model that originally justified the idea, “man-made global climate change.”

Representatives of 195 countries – yes, that’s almost every country on earth – signed onto the agreement, commonly known as The Paris Accord. In many cases, one representative’s signature was enough, and in others, the signature is meaningless without ratification by the country’s legislature, politburo, or other ruling parties. For example, President Obama’s approval was enough to count the USA in the 195, but since our Senate would never ratify such an outrageous treaty (one prays, anyway), we are not counted among the ratifying parties.

We’re not alone; only 148 of the 195 signatories have actually ratified it. That still sounds significant, of course, but it’s worth remembering because the press and their puppets in the Democratic Party (or is it the other way around?) give the impression that we would stand alone before the world if we refused to ratify it. In fact, with the USA’s withdrawal, the USA just joins a full quarter of the earth’s countries that had a representative sign onto the thing in the excitement of the meeting, but were blessed with legislatures that thought through the matter, and quietly denied or postponed the fool notion.

The Paris Accord

The accord was championed by the Left for its aggressive attack on the production of “greenhouse gases,” demanding that countries replace existing forms of energy production with “green energy” sources, such as solar and wind power.

The fact that solar and wind, which certainly have their place, are incredibly inefficient, and therefore incredibly costlier, than existing sources, didn’t bother the negotiators, for two primary reasons:

First, if governments subsidize the utilities with tax dollars, particularly some other country's tax dollars (guess whose?), people might not notice their massive increase in energy cost, and

Second, the USA is the only donor country that was seriously expected to honor the commitment. Nobody honestly believed that other signers, like China or India, were ever going to abandon the energy that keeps their economies growing. The USA would suffer honorably, and that would be sufficient for them.

The agreement is designed to have a huge financial commitment by all member nations, including a commitment to $100 billion per year globally in specific funding called “climate finance,” much of which would be direct transfer payments from the USA and other developed nations to the LDDCs – the “least developed developing countries” of the world.

It is based on the idea that of all the things nations have to worry about – defense against invasion, unemployment, epidemics, crime waves, terrorism, etc. – everyone on earth should recognize that climate change is the issue that outranks all others.

There is really only one way to have a prayer of convincing a country under assault by Boko Haram or ISIS, or by Ebola or Malaria, or by mass unemployment or the threat of war, to adopt such a program: if you see the biggest, most successful economies on earth doing it first.

The Paris Accord was really designed to be all about peer pressure; if the United States, the most dynamic economy on earth, was a believer, then that would be good enough reason for all the other developed economies, and all those third world LDDCs too, to fall in line.

When President Trump, on behalf of the United States, announced our withdrawal from this suicidal do-it-yourself bankruptcy engine, that brought down the whole house of cards. The world leaders who support the thing must now denounce Mr. Trump and his country, as derisively as possible, in order to keep everyone else in line. Just as the USA would have been a leader if we had ratified, they must now fear that the USA will be a leader in fleeing the foolish thing.

Make no mistake: the opponents of Paris are right. Because of the incredible cost of this agreement, a nation’s leaders must make a clear and absolute choice: either support this climate change theory and cause severe economic constriction at home, or work toward the prosperity of one’s countrymen by dumping the agreement.

The only moral choice for an honorable national leader is to support his own nation’s economy, and walk away from The Paris Accord. The fact that 148 nations failed to make that choice appears to be quite an indictment, but remember, in many of their cases, they don’t really have to give anything up.

For much of the third world, signing the Paris Accord was tantamount to signing up for welfare benefits; if you qualify, if it’s free, if you have no moral compunction about collecting such charity, why not do it?

Climate Change – Truths and Lies

Among the primary lies in this whole debate is the Left’s claim that the right is denying science. In fact, it’s the Right that’s using the scientific method – looking for evidence, studying it carefully, dismissing evidence that’s been proven to be fabricated, making rational judgments based on unassailable facts.

The concept of manmade climate change was based on the famous “hockey stick” climate model which was proven to be utterly fabricated, years ago. The evidence that it wasn’t errant, but intentional, is found in chains of emails that the entire world has seen. The entire theory is based on a lie, on falsified research that was born of twin desires for grant money and the political goal of stronger government.

Even their own statistics now claim that there has been no average warming for the past twenty years; their whole claim of a rising global average temperature is based on the period before they dreamed up the whole idea. Since the publication of Al Gore’s famous work of science fiction in the early 90s – “Earth in the Balance” – even their own calculations show nothing to worry about, in the specific area of “terrifying rising average temperatures.”

But even so, this does not mean that there aren’t climate-related challenges. There are true climate-related dangers in the world, as there have always been.

The Left’s other primary lie is that they are the only ones who care about climate-related risks, the only ones who care about the people, towns, and even countries that may suffer if the horrors they fear come to pass.

Again, the Left’s position is simply, utterly wrong.

The Left does one thing, and only one: upon deciding that they fear worse weather and possibly rising seas, which would threaten people in low-lying coastal towns, people near rivers, people in hurricane, earthquake, or tornado paths… the Left literally decided to strive to change the weather; to stop the tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, and rising seas from ever happening in the first place.

There is no proof anywhere that anything they propose – changing our sources of energy, raising taxes to an even more confiscatory level, paying for new palaces for third world dictators under the guise of providing their countries with new green power plants, etc. – will make any difference at all to the earth’s climate. It’s a theory, utterly unproven, and likely unprovable. It’s a desperate prayer by people who have chosen to put all their eggs in one untested basket.

By contrast, the Right’s position is both more realistic on science and more compassionate toward the people.

The Right recognizes that there have always been hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and tornadoes, so our economies need to be able to deal with these tragedies.

The Right wants our people to be prosperous, so that if towns and bridges are knocked down, they can rebuild… if ports are flooded, they can be restored… if people’s livelihoods are washed out, they have new opportunities so they can get a fresh start.

What the Right recognizes – but the Left either does not, or will not – is that the cure for the dangers of a changing climate is not some stubborn effort to imagine that we mortals can change the weather at all. No, the cure is to have a vigorous economy that can withstand any shock… a private sector – and a public sector too – that can afford to bounce back from the worst disasters.

The Right believes in taking advantage of all the opportunities of capitalism and modern technology to feed the hungry, to heat the cold, to air-condition the hot, and to house the homeless.

The Right advocates a growth economy, harnessing energy – yes, ALL kinds of energy – to create enough industry, and therefore enough prosperity, that we can afford to react to anything that Mother Nature chooses to throw at us.

By contrast, what does the Left do, in its hubris and delusion, dreaming that it can bring climate stability to a planet that has had ice ages and heat spells, glaciers and earthquakes, hurricanes and floods, virtually since the dawn of time?

The Left dismisses all the opportunities provided by technology and economic advancement, even intentionally suppresses them, in a vain hope that fewer cars and fewer furnaces, greater poverty and a literal retreat into the past, might keep the icebergs in the polar regions and keep storms from turning into hurricanes as they have always done.

The Left is literally using windmills … to tilt at windmills.

Copyright 2017 John F. Di Leo

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based Customs broker, actor, and writer. His columns are regularly found in Illinois Review.

Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the IR URL and byline are included.

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Di Leo: Truth, Lies, and The Paris Accord

By John F. Di Leo -

In 2015, one of the endless subsets of the United Nations – specifically, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC – gathered to write a retreat from modernity based on the junk science known as “man-made global warming,” or, more recently, since the discovery of the undeniably fabricated “hockey stick” model that originally justified the idea, “man-made global climate change.”